Philippe ThalmannOriginaire de Malters (LU), Philippe Thalmann est né à Lausanne en 1963. Il est licencié en économie politique de l'Université de Lausanne en 1984, où il a aussi obtenu le diplôme postgrade dans la même branche en 1986. M. Thalmann est entré dans le programme doctoral en économie de l'Université Harvard (Cambridge, E.-U.) en 1986 et l'a achevé avec le doctorat (Ph.D.) en 1990. De retour en Suisse, il est nommé maître-assistant à l'Université de Genève pour y enseigner l'économie et les finances publiques, puis professeur assistant à l'Université de Lausanne en 1993, pour y enseigner l'économétrie appliquée et l'économie nationale. En 1994, M. Thalmann est nommé professeur extraordinaire à l'EPFL (aujourd'hui professeur associé). Lors de la réorganisation de l'EPFL en 2000, il réoriente sa chaire de l'économie de la construction vers l'économie de l'environnement naturel et construit.
Alexandre Massoud AlahiAlexandre Alahi is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL. He spent five years at Stanford University as a Post-doc and Research Scientist after obtaining his Ph.D. from EPFL. His research enables machines to perceive the world and make decisions in the context of transportation problems and smart environments. He has worked on the theoretical challenges and practical applications of socially-aware Artificial Intelligence, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social intelligence. He was awarded the Swiss NSF early and advanced researcher grants for his work on predicting human social behavior. He won the CVPR Open Source Award (2012) for his work on Retina-inspired image descriptors, and the ICDSC Challenge Prize (2009) for his sparsity-driven algorithm that has tracked more than 100 million pedestrians to date. His research has been covered internationally by BBC, abc, PBS, Euronews, Wall street journal, and other national news outlets around the world. Alexandre has also co-founded multiple startups such as Visiosafe, and won several startup competitions. He was elected as one of the Top 20 Swiss Venture leaders in 2010.
Karl AbererCo-Founder of LinkAlong Sarl, 2017.Vice-president EPFL for Information Systems, 2012 –2016.Director of the Swiss National Centre for Mobile Information and Communication Systems NCCR MICS (mics.ch), 2005 -2012.Member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council SWTR, consulting the Swiss Federal government, 2004 - 2011.
Willy ZwaenepoelWilly Zwaenepoel received his B.S. from the University of Gent, Belgium in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 and 1984, respectively. In September 2002, he joined EPFL. He was Dean of the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at EPFL from 2002 to 2011. Before joining EPFL, Willy Zwaenepoel was on the faculty at Rice University, where he was the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, and Fellow of the ACM in 2000. In 2000 he received the Rice University Graduate Student Association Teaching and Mentoring Award. In 2007 he received the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai award. He was elected to the European Academy in 2009. He won best paper awards at SigComm 1984, OSDI 1999, Usenix 2000, Usenix 2006 and Eurosys 2007. He was program chair of OSDI in 1996 and Eurosys in 2006, and general chair of Mobisys in 2004. He was also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems from 1998 to 2002.
Willy Zwaenepoel has worked in a variety of aspects of operating and distributed systems, including microkernels, fault tolerance, parallel scientific computing on clusters of workstations, clusters for web services, mobile computing, database replication and virtualization. He is most well known for his work on the Treadmarks distributed shared memory system, which was licensed to Intel and became the basis for Intels OpenMP cluster product. His work on high-performance software for network I/O led to the creation of iMimic Networking, Inc, which he led from 2000 to 2005. His current interests include large-scale data stores and software testing. Most recently, his work in software testing led to the creation of BugBuster, a startup based in Lausanne.
